Tech

Beyond Breaking Things: All the News From Facebook's F8

Facebook unveiled a slew of new products and initiatives at the company's F8 developer conference keynote on Wednesday, nearly all of them developer-related.

Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the event with a few remarks but left most of the talking to other Facebook execs who focused on topics like building apps, growing a mobile audience, and then monetizing that audience. There was an emphasis on helping app developers get off the ground and work alongside Facebook in the process.

Facebook has made great strides in mobile over the past 24 months, and the recent acquisition of Parse — along with its simple tools for helping new apps get off the ground fast — only deepened the company's commitment to growing with mobile.

Just what does all of this mean for the everyday Facebook user? Here are the five most important things that we learned from the F8 keynote.

1. Facebook is growing up

Mark Zuckerberg says that the old "Move Fast and Break Things" motto that Facebook has become famous for is now a thing of the past. The new motto: "Move Fast With Stable Infra."

The announcement got some laughs from the audience, and the motto may not stick quite like the old one, but the point is that Facebook is growing, and in order to continue doing so, breaking things isn't much of an option any more. Zuckerberg also promised that all major bugs in Facebook products will be fixed within 48 hours — a reasonably impressive commitment considering there are more than a billion users on the platform each month.

"It might not have the same ring to it and might not be as catchy," Zuckerberg said. "But it helps us build better experiences for everyone we serve and how we operate now."

2. Facebook says it's giving users more control

We know, we know — sounds like the same old story. But Facebook seems to be trying to gain user trust by giving them more power over what they share, and what third-party apps can see about them.

Facebook is rolling out new kinds of permissions for apps. These will let enables users to select, line by line, what Facebook info they want to share with a third-party app. Your public profile will always be required, but soon other info like your friends list or your birthday will be optional. You can share what you want, and opt out of what you want to keep private. Previously, apps would request a list of items they wanted you to share, and you were required to share all or nothing.

Developers will be switching over to this new permissions page in the next year, according to Facebook Product Manager Eddie O'Neil. No one is rolling out the new permissions page Wednesday, and it will take time for apps to restructure to prepare for the fact that users will likely be sharing less info with them moving forward.

3. Users can try new apps "anonymously"

Facebook has long preached the importance of users acting on Facebook with their "true identity," but Wednesday the company rolled out an Anonymous Login feature that allows users to test apps without sharing any Facebook info. It sounds strange given Facebook's guiding philosophy, but O'Neil doesn't see it that way.

The anonymity aspect is between the user and the app, not the user and Facebook, he explains.

Apps will determine at what point a user needs to share more info to continue using the app, but users won't have to provide all their info up front. Facebook is testing the feature with five apps right now, including Flipboard.

4. Facebook now has an official mobile ad network

Facebook has been experimenting with a mobile ad network since January, and Facebook Product Management Director Deb Liu made it official at F8, announcing Audience Network. It's a tool Facebook's 1 million advertisers can use to place ads into third-party apps. We already knew Facebook had successfully transitioned the majority of its business to mobile (it's now 59% of the company's revenue), and it's spreading that to developers.

Audience Network will reportedly make it easier for advertisers to target the right apps with the right kind of experiences.

"We've done a lot of work already in the past years to help you build and grow your apps," Zuckerberg said during the keynote. "This is really the first time that we are going to help you monetize on mobile."

5. Apps will soon talk to each other better

After acquiring Parse last year, Facebook has clearly made its developer-friendly tools a priority. Parse provides back-end cloud services to many apps, making it easy for developers to integrate push alerts and analytics into their apps, which were mentioned prominently at the keynote.

Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar took things several steps further with the announcement of AppLinks, a new open standard for linking between apps. The thrust of AppLinks is to bring back the ease of sharing a URL on the web to links within apps. Theoretically, with AppLinks, clicking on a link to a Soundcloud file in Evernote would launch the app, with the ability to seamlessly return to the original app after experiencing the content.

This kind of functionality exists in a limited way on iOS and Android already, but Facebook intends AppLinks to become the standard, and Sukhar said it would be open-source. The project is hosted at AppLinks.org.

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